Jack Rudolph Neave was a real figure,  an escape artist,  a fortune teller and raconteur, who wore an iron boot to help him walk, hence the name. He was the self-styled “King of the Bohemians” in Soho in pre- and post-war London.

“I became acquainted with gipsies [sic], with show people, with buskers, with people who entertained by performing in the city, on fair grounds and market places… and with a variety of ‘fiddles’ – that is, some dubious methods of obtaining the means of life. I became a member of their fraternity.”

His book – unpublished in his lifetime – was “the outcome of years of struggle to survive; of solving the problem of existence by various and curious methods… Most of the people I am talking about led a precarious life and obtained their livelihood from day to day… They worked to live; they did not live to work.”

Ironfoot Jack and his recently rediscovered memoir will be introduced by Colin Stanley, the editor of Colin Wilson Studies.

Admission: £3.00, including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming by emailing us at events@fiveleaves.co.uk

We are pleased to launch Panya’s new poetry collection Some Things (published by Burning Eye).

Her collection reflects her position as one of the first generation of Caribbean people born in Britain and she portrays the sometimes uneasy interactions between those of an immigrant background and those of the dominant culture, aware of often being the outsider. Despite injustice, there is hope for redemption. Good will come out of bad.

Panya Banjoko is well-known on the poetry performance circuit. She is one of the founders of Nottingham Black Archive and is a patron of Nottingham City of Literature. She is also one of the founders of Read a Black Writer Day.

Admission free, refreshments available, but please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk.

This summer, Clare Harvey has been reading all the books by the Nottingham writer Dorothy Whipple.

Born in 1893, Dorothy Whipple  had a happy childhood in Blackburn as part of the large family of a local architect. Her close friend George Owen having been killed in the first week of the war, for three years she worked as secretary to Henry Whipple, an educational administrator who was a widower twenty-four years her senior and whom she married in 1917. Their life was mostly spent in Nottingham; here she wrote Young Anne (1927), the first of eight extremely successful novels which include High Wages (1930), Greenbanks (1932), The Priory (1939) and Because of the Lockwoods (1949). Almost all her books were Book Society Choices or Recommendations and two of them, They Knew Mr Knight (1934) and They Were Sisters (1943), were made into films. She also wrote short stories (including The Closed Door and Other Stories and Every Good Deed and Other Stories) and two volumes of memoirs. Someone at a Distance(1953) was her final novel. Returning in her last years to Blackburn, Dorothy Whipple died there in 1966.

Her books have been re-issued as handsome grey paperbacks by Persephone, and her works are stocked by libraries and bookshops.

Clare Harvey – a professional novelist herself – will share her findings with you. A few others around the Nottingham City of Literature project have also been spending their summer with Dorothy, but whether you have read all, one or none of her novels you will be equally welcome.

Clare’s latest book of wartime fiction is The Night Raid

This event is free, refreshments are provided. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk.

In association with Nottingham Irish Studies Group, one of a set of three weekly lectures this season.

The Easter Rising of 1916 was the foundational event of the modern Irish state, and the centenary was recently celebrated with high-profile commemorations in Ireland.  In this talk, Jim Moran will explore some of the local connections between the English midlands and this insurrection, showing how some of the thoughts of the key figures in the rebellion derived from their links with this region.

Jim Moran is Professor of Modern English Literature and Drama at the University of Nottingham.  His books include Staging the Easter Rising and, as editor, Four Irish Rebel Plays. He has also worked on the history of the Sherwood Foresters of 1916.

Admission: £3 including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

The Kurdish territory of Rojava in Syria has become a watchword for radical democracy, communalism and gender equality. But while Western radicals continue to project their own values onto the revolution, the complexities of the situation are often overlooked or misunderstood.

Based on over 17 years of research and fieldwork, Thomas Schmidinger provides a detailed introduction to the history and political situation in Rojava. Outlining the history of the Kurds in Syria from the late Ottoman Empire until the Syrian civil war, he describes the developments in Rojava since 2011: the protests against the regime, the establishment of a Kurdish para-state, the conflicts between the parties about the administration of the Kurdish territory and how the PYD and its People’s Councils rule the territory.

The book draws on interviews with political leaders of different parties, civil society activists, artists, fighters and religious leaders in order to paint an complex picture of the historical conflict and the contemporary situation.

Thomas Schmidinger is a Political Scientist and Cultural Anthropologist based at the University of Vienna. He is Secretary General of the Austrian Association for Kurdish studies. He is the author of Rojava (Pluto, 2018), which received the Mezlum Bagok award. He has written extensively on Kurdistan, Sudan, Kosovo, jihadism, migration and Muslim communities in Europa.

In association with the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and Pluto Press

Admission £3, including refreshments, redeemable against any purchase. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

Gerald O’Donovan, radical priest and novelist, (1871–1942) was ordained into the priesthood at Maynooth in the spring of 1895. He was a practical and political priest, who lobbied for various reforms on behalf of the poor of his parish. Less than a decade later, however, the zealous young man had thrown up his clerical duties, travelling to Dublin and then to London in order to forge a literary career. He went on to pen six novels, many of which take an aggressively anti-clerical approach.
This talk reflects upon O’Donovan’s fictional depictions of vocations of various kinds, be these religious, political or artistic. The books covered range from his 1913 autobiographical novel Father Ralph, a succès de scandale in pre-War London, to the 1921 novel Vocations, which contains a devastating portrait of Irish convent life.

Dr Chrissie Van Mierlo has taught at the Universities of Nottingham and Loughborough. She is the author of James Joyce and Catholicism: The Apostate’s Wake (Bloomsbury 2017). She works at Erewash Museum.

One of three events in a series by Nottingham Irish Studies Group

Admission: £3 including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

One of three lectures with Nottingham Irish Studies Group this season

‘But what really happened?’: Anne Enright’s The Gathering

Anne Enright is one of the most innovative and exciting writers in Ireland today. Her work, with its dark humour and wryness, is able to be hilariously funny while dealing with serious subjects. Her career to date bookends the Celtic Tiger Ireland of the 1990s and early 2000s, and her work comments directly on the cultural climate of these years, considering the relationship between past and present, between how we remember and what we forget, both individually and at the level of the nation.

Enright’s interest in giving a voice to what has been silenced and repressed by history is matched by playful experiments with form and unreliable narrative, and an unnerving honesty.  Her novel The Gathering, which won the Man Booker prize in 2007, begins with Veronica Hegarty, a Dublin housewife and very unreliable narrator, breaking the news of her brother Liam’s suicide to their mother. We follow her on her attempts to make sense of Liam’s life and death, and to try to uncover a hidden trauma –  which may or may not have happened, or which may have happened to her, rather than her brother – at the heart of the rackety Hegarty family’s life.

Sinead joined De Montfort University in 2014 as a Research Fellow and in 2016 was appointed a Senior Lecturer in English. Her research interests include Irish literature, modernism, the work of Samuel Beckett, and women’s writing, particularly Irish women’s writing of the late 19th and early 20th century, and contemporary writing. She has taught and published widely in these areas.

Admission: £3, including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

This event is a book group discussion – Kamila Shamsie will not be present! Five Leaves Book Group is open, you can attend one meeting or all, there is no commitment other than to have read the book in advance and be ready to discuss it.

We don’t mind where you obtain the book, but we do offer a 15% discount in the lead up to the event.

Isma is free. After years spent raising her twin siblings in the wake of their mother’s death, she is finally studying in America, resuming a dream long deferred. But she can’t stop worrying about Aneeka, her headstrong sister back in London – or their brother, Parvaiz, who’s disappeared in pursuit of his own dream: to prove himself to the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew.

Then Eamonn enters the sisters’ lives. He inhabits a London worlds away from theirs. As the son of a powerful British Muslim politician, Eamonn has his own birthright to live up to – or defy. Is he to be a chance at love? The means of Parvaiz’s salvation? Two families’ fates are inextricably, devastatingly entwined in this novel that asks: what sacrifices will we make in the name of love?

A contemporary reimagining of Sophocles’ Antigone, Home Fire compelling story of loyalties torn apart when love and politics collide. This book won the Women’s Prize for Fiction.

Free, refreshments provided. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

Join us to celebrate international poetry in a reading featuring translated work from Farsi, Greek, Russian, Irish and other languages. Members of Nottingham Poetry Society and Beeston Poets will share their favourite poetic voices from around the world.

Special guest Maura Dooley will talk about her experience of translating the work of Iranian refugee Azita Ghahreman collected in her new book of Ghahreman’s poetry Negatives of a Group Portrait.

Bar available. Under 18s to be accompanied by an adult.

This event forms part of the Inpire Poetry Festival taking place across Beeston, Mansfield, Southwell, West Bridford and Worksop Libraries.

In association with Nottingham Poetry Society

Tickets £5 (£1 from every ticket will be donated to a local refugee charity).

Note: tickets are only available from Beeston Library or inspireculture.org.uk/poetry-festival, and not from Five Leaves

Professor Wendy Miriam Kural Shaw (Freie Univiversität, Berlin, Germany)

Chair and Event Organiser: Dr Cüneyt Çakırlar (NTU)

This talk comprises part of the House of Wisdom exhibition at the Bonington Gallery running from 28 September to 28 October 

Jonathan will be reading from his latest collection, Cassandra Complex, a collection of poems, found poems, found translations, mis-translations, prophecies, pseudo-prophecies, apocalyptic visions and moments of retroactive clairvoyance.

His previous books include the novel Melissa (Salt), the memoir Take Me Home (Granta), and an earlier poetry collection, Musicolepsy (Shoestring Press). He has been a popular reader at the bookshop, States of Independence and, this summer, at Lowdham Book Festival.

What They Left Behind is Sue Dymoke’s third Shoestring Press collection after Moon at the Park and Ride and The New Girls – new and selected poems. She is a Reader in Education at the University of Leicester where she researches and teaches aspects of poetry pedagogy. She has given writing workshops and keynote lectures at universities in Japan, New Zealand and Europe as well as in primary schools, secondary schools and writers’ groups. She is a fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts. Other honours include the Terry Furlong Research Award from the National Association for the Teaching of English and a National Teaching Fellowship. She is the author of Drafting and Assessing Poetry (Paul Chapman); two  volumes from Bloomsbury, Making Poetry Matter: international research on poetry pedagogy and Making Poetry Happen: transforming the poetry classroom, and, with Andy Croft, edited the anthology Not Just a Game: Sporting Poetry (Five Leaves).

Tonight she will be reading from her latest Shoestring collection – being launched this evening.

Free, refreshments included. Please let us know you are coming, on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

OK, Five Leaves is not an all-night bookstore (but a shop can dream, can’t it?) but we do have lots of events going on in the evenings! Tonight we start a bit later than normal to be something more of an all-night bookstore for this Candlestick Press event with David Belbin reading his short story, The All-Night Bookshop together with some related material.

The bookshop in question is a mysterious independent bookshop, with an even more mysterious owner.

Today is Bookshop Day, an annual celebration run by the Booksellers Association/Books Are My Bag, with hundreds of events in bookshops across the country.

Free, refreshments provided. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

Kathy Page is a British writer, now living in Canada. One of her earlier books, The Story of My Face,  grew out of a writer’s residency at Nottingham Prison. That book was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for women’s fiction.

At this event Kathy will be in conversation about her career and reading from her new novel from And Other Stories, Dear Evelyn. The story starts between the wars in a working-class South London street where the sensitive Miles seeks out literature in Battersea Library. There he meets Evelyn and there follows an unconventional seventy year love story which moves from the terraced streets of South London to war service in Africa and the cloying bounty of new-built suburbs.

Kathy Pages work has been praised by Sarah Waters and Margaret Atwood and we are pleased to welcome her over from Canada.

Admission: £5 including tea and scones. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

Emily Brontë’s incomparable Wuthering Heights is, for many of us, one of our most cherished novels, with the character of Heathcliff being the ultimate romantic hero. It is a work that has bewitched us for almost 200 years. But Emily herself remains an enigmatic, even mysterious figure, often painted unfairly in a negative light. In this talk Claire O’Callaghan conjures a new image of the great writer by looking at her afresh from the vantage point of the new millennium. It’s a biography with a twist, taking in the themes of her life and work – her feminism, her passion for the natural world – as well as the art she has inspired, and even the “fake news” stories about her. What we discover is that she was, a thoroughly modern woman. And now, in the 21st century, it’s time for the real Emily Brontë to please stand up.

Claire O’Callaghan lectures in English at Loughborough University. Her research focuses on Victorian literature and culture, with an emphasis on gender, sexuality, and queerness.  She is a specialist on the works of the novelist Sarah Waters but her present research is on the lives and works of the Brontës, especially Emily Brontë.

Admission: £3 including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

Leafe Press was launched at a reading in Nottingham in April 2000, and has published a wide range of poetry, though our main interest at present is in innovative or experimental poetry.

Tonight’s reading comprises new and old work from Frances Presley, Martin Stannard and Andrew Taylor.

As well as pamphlets and books, Leafe publishes the online magazine Litter  (http://www.leafepress.com/litter/index.html).

£3, including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming by emailing us at  events@fiveleaves.co.uk

Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting is shortlisted for the Forward Prize for first full collection.

Shivanee Ramlochan is a Trinidadian poet, arts reporter and book blogger. She is the Book Reviews Editor for Caribbean Beat Magazine. Shivanee also writes about books for the NGC Bocas Lit Fest, the Anglophone Caribbean’s largest literary festival, as well as Paper Based Bookshop, Trinidad and Tobago’s oldest independent Caribbean speciality bookseller. She is the deputy editor of The Caribbean Review of Books. Her first book of poems, Everyone Knows I Am a Haunting, is published by Peepal Tree Press. Shivanee also blogs about LGBT+ issues in the Caribbean.

Admission: £5 (£4 concessions) including refreshments. Booking essential via events@fiveleaves.co.uk

In association with Renaissance One and Nottingham City of Literature

Your collection reveals a plethora of women, either as witness (i. e. the virgin in the woods), or women who have been vilified (the abortionist’s daughter) or who have been cast out and banished/excluded (Lilith). Many of your poems subvert the demonic and offer a counterpointal view; they give us kind parents for ‘the wicked’, for example. Can some of this be ‘writing back’ or even rewriting the tainted women of the old books? Recasting lore and folklore? I’m thinking of this as a tradition in female Caribbean writing, Rhys, Melville etc.

I’ve been in love with nasty women long before that term acquired currency as a trending battle cry. This is the reason Kali is the god of my household of one – no sanitised version, but Kali in her black-skinned, murderous, protectorate ire and grace. It’s my honour to write about women who bleed, fuck, dance, cuss, transact and thief without apology, be they gentle or garrotte-hearted.

From 2.00-3.00 some of us, and many of our customers, adults and children, Black and White, will be quietly reading a book by a Black writer in Nottingham Market Square.

No need to book, just turn up and do it! Last year everyone wanted to know what everyone else is reading.

Our main display table will be entirely devoted to Black writers in support of the day.

In association with Nottingham Poetry Exchange, we are pleased to welcome the experimental poet Hazel Smith, from Australia

Hazel Smith is a poet, performer and new media artist, and has published four volumes of poetry, three CDs of performance work and numerous multimedia works.  Her volume, Word Migrants, was published by Giramondo Publishing, Sydney. The Erotics of Geography: poetry, performance texts, new media works, with accompanying CD Rom, was published by Tinfish Press, Kaneohe, Hawaii. In 2016 her multimedia collaboration ‘motions’ with Will Luers and Roger Dean was included in the Electronic Literature Collection 3: the premier international anthology of electronic writing.  Her collaboration with Will Luers and Roger Dean ‘novelling’ was shortlisted for the ‘Turn on Literature Prize’, an initiative of the Creative Europe Program of the European Union. She is a member of austraLYSIS, the sound and intermedia arts group, and has performed her work extensively in the US, Europe, UK and Australasia. Her website is at www.australysis.com

You can hear Hazel read at  http://www.australysis.com/hear-see-read/aLYS-works/worksHText.html

Hazel Smith was a research professor in the Writing and Society Research Centre at the Western Sydney University from 2007-2017 and is now an adjunct professor. She is author of The Contemporary Literature-Music Relationship: intermedia, voice, technology, cross-cultural exchange, Routledge, The Writing Experiment: strategies for innovative creative writing, Allen and Unwin, and Hyperscapes in the Poetry of Frank O’Hara: difference, homosexuality, topography, Liverpool University Press. She is co-author of Improvisation, Hypermedia and The Arts Since 1945, Harwood Academic, 1997 and co-editor with Roger Dean of Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts, Edinburgh University Press.

Admission £3, including refreshments. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

Rod Madocks specialises in writing on the difficult world of mental health and social work, having great sympathy for life’s casualties. Tonight he will be reading from Our Tan: memoir of a destroyed life, a lament for the loss of a young woman and a savage critique of the institutions that failed her.

Tania Blair was a young mother of two boys leading an unremarkable life in County Durham until social services took a hand. Once a front-line social worker himself, Rod Madocks uses his own experience to explore the faulty rationale and inept practices of child protection teams. This memoir casts an unforgiving eye on health and social care agencies in general and on the fate of the English working class as they are tipped down the maw of a globalised future. Our Tan is a book that had to be written because no other avenues of help were left.

A transgressive writer, Rod Madocks is the author of two novels and a collection of short stories exploring themes of crime, guilt and loss. He has also published a memoir on the WW2 poet Sidney Keyes. His work has been shortlisted for a Crime Writing Association Dagger Award. He had a twenty year career working in maximum security psychiatric units and mental health teams before becoming a full time writer.

John Lucas, Rod Madocks’ editor at Shoestring Press has had a long career as a poet and critic and a late-flowering career as a writer of fiction. His books also include a short history of whistling, published by Five Leaves.  John follows his four novels with a collection of short fiction, launched tonight,  The Hotel of Dreams and other stories.

Free, refreshments included. Please let us know you are coming on events@fiveleaves.co.uk

This talk reconstructs the first two decades of the twentieth century feminist magazine Time and Tide and explores the periodical’s significance for an interwar generation of British women writers and readers. Unique in establishing itself as the only female-run ‘journal of opinion’ in what press historians describe as the golden age of the weekly review, Time and Tide both challenged persistent prejudices against women’s participation in public life, and played an instrumental role in redefining women’s gender roles and identities. Drawing on extensive new archival research Catherine offers insights into the history and workings of this periodical that no one has dealt with to date, and makes a major contribution to the history of women’s writing and feminism in Britain between the wars.

Contributors to Time and Tide included  D. H. Lawrence, Vera Brittain, Winifred Holtby, Virginia Woolf, Crystal Eastman, Charlotte Haldane, Storm Jameson, Nancy Astor , Eleanor Rathbone, Margaret Wintringham, Rebecca West, Elizabeth Robins, Rose Macaulay, Mary  Agnes Hamilton, Naomi Mitchison, Helena Swanwick, Ellen Wilkinson, Ethel Smyth, Emma Goldman, George Bernard Shaw, Ernst Toller, Robert Graves and George Orwell.

Dr Clay is Course Leader for the MRes in English Literary Research postgraduate degree programme at Nottingham Trent Univerity. She also teaches across the undergraduate curriculum, including on Gender and Sexuality.

Admission: £3, including refreshments, redeemable against any purchase